Interior Ministry faces backlash after website fails to update election results

The Interior Ministry was blasted Wednesday for failing to adequately update the public and the media on results of the municipal elections, with a specially designed website collapsing during the most critical hours of vote-counting.

Before Tuesday’s elections, the ministry promised to display the data in real time along with an interactive map, but the figures ended up not being available at all for hours due to a technical malfunction.

Even when it was online, the map didn’t make it clear what percentage of the ballots had already been counted, and in many cases displayed inaccurate data. On Wednesday morning, the ministry decided to terminate its voting data system.

Nevertheless, data published by the ministry in the morning contained mistakes, such as saying there was a second round in the Har Hebron council when in reality incumbent Yochai Damari had won by a large margin.

The Interior Ministry told the Ynet news site that its site was under a cyberattack on Tuesday afternoon, saying hackers had set up a website mimicking the ministry’s in an attempt to steal voters’ personal details. The website broke down for some time, but i he ministry said it had no indication that the later problems with the results website was in any way connected to that attack.

The ministry claimed its handling of the elections had been “exemplary and very successful.”

“The election was done in an impressive and professional manner that should make us proud,” said the ministry’s director-general, Mordechai Cohen.

He acknowledged, though, that the data had been wrong for the Har Hebron race.